by Miriam Cohen
Karin touched her cheek. She didn’t feel warm. She felt cold still, from outside.
“I’m in trouble,” Karin said.
“Is that so?” Her father smiled at her as if she’d told a joke. “Tell us about your troubles.”
But she wasn’t troubled. She was in trouble. Karin tapped her chest three times.
“How come you’re home?” she said.
“Sometimes we have date night during the day,” her father said.
“You don’t want divorced parents, do you?” Karin’s mother said. “How would you feel about a new little brother or sister? What would you rather? A brother, a sister, or a divorce?”
Karin’s father started to laugh. “When you put it like that,” he said. He put his hand on her mother’s stomach. He raised one eyebrow.
Karin raised both eyebrows back. She liked being part of her parents’ conversation, making a decision with them, the way, sometimes in school, everyone put their heads down on their desks and raised their hands in an anonymous vote.
“I vote for a sister,” she said. “No, a brother.” She hugged her shoulders.
“Now look what you’ve started,” Karin’s mother said to her father. She rested her head on his shoulder.
Karin didn’t want to watch her parents. She tucked her hands into the waistband of her skirt, pretending a toilet-paper train.
“Cut that out,” her father said. “She’s touching herself,” he said, not to anyone. He squinted at the floor.
Karin took her hand out of her skirt. She turned so her parents could only see her back and tapped herself six times on the chest, because she was sorry. There was something very wrong, she understood, with wanting to be a bride
Being a bride was like buying a fur coat or an evening gown: It made you look beautiful for a little while, and then it made you lock yourself in the bathroom and not come out until morning, when you pretended, over cereal, that nothing had happened. Karin wanted to warn Ms. Davidson, who laughed with her head back, and was beautiful already, even if that wasn’t obvious at first. But she also felt like lying down on the floor and crying with her fists and legs, because she wanted, still, to be beautiful, to have a dress that was hers. She wanted a dress like Lila’s that would upstage Ms. Davidson’s.
“Mommy,” Karin said. She tugged on her mother’s free hand. Her mother swatted her away and it wasn’t fair. She’d thought they both hated her father.
Karin went to her room and placed Ms. Davidson’s wedding invitation next to her parents’ wedding album. Outside it was snowing again. The sky was white. Karin wondered if Jonah could go out during the day if there wasn’t sun. She wanted to know what had happened to him, and, also, what he did all day when he wasn’t in school. She remembered the laminated card with his address, and arranged it next to the wedding album and the invitation. One, two, three.
She couldn’t go to the wedding without a dress, but instead she could do something courageous. She could visit the boy allergic to the sun.
Karin left a note on Amelia’s bed so she wouldn’t worry. She copied down the number on the play date card, and also the address, just in case. “This is where I am,” she wrote. The wedding album and invitation were lonely without the play-date card, so Karin copied down the address on another piece of paper for herself, and they all got to stay together.
Karin asked her mother if she could drive her over to her play-date. If her mother knew anything, she would know it was too early for a play-date—everyone was still supposed to be in school. But her mother didn’t know anything.
“A play-date,” her mother said. “It’s so fun to be a kid.”
Karin’s mother called to her father that she’d be right back, and he called from the kitchen that she’d come back soon if she knew what was good for her. He was in love with her mother today, and this made him funny and loving and nice, even when he said things that would otherwise be mean.
Karin’s mother swung the car keys between her fingers, and they chimed against each other like bells. Karin gave her mother the address, and her mother nodded. “This is close,” she said.
In the car, her mother turned on music and sang along. She had the most beautiful voice of anyone Karin had ever met, and her mother’s singing made Karin feel like she was flying. Karin watched the trees and cars and houses move outside, and she imagined herself soaring above everything, and then her mother held a high note and Karin’s skin felt tight, and she thought she might burst with how glorious she felt.
Karin recognized the numbers on the mailbox and unbuckled her seatbelt.
“Karin, honey?” her mother said. Her hands were tight over the steering wheel. “Do you think they look down on us, because they have a bigger house?”
Karin no longer felt glorious. She felt too hot in the car.
“It’s not bigger,” she said.
“Really?” her mother said.
Karin nodded. “Kisses,” her mother said, and Karin swept her eyelashes against her mother’s, once, twice, three times.
Jonah’s mother opened the door.
“Well!” she said. She massaged the back of her neck with both hands.
Up close, she didn’t look anything like Karin’s mother. She was much less beautiful, and she didn’t wear makeup at all.
“I came for a play-date,” Karin said.
“We just didn’t think school was the right choice, every day,” Jonah’s mother said.
“I was sent home on the kindergarten bus,” Karin said.
Jonah’s mother checked her watch. “But you’re not sick, are you? Because if you are, I’m so sorry, but Jonah’s resistance…”
Karin shook her head. “I got in trouble,” she said. She put her hand to her forehead. “I’m not sick.”
Jonah’s mother’s whole face changed into a smile, as if Karin were something valuable and rare. “It’s cold out,” she said, finally. “Come in.”
The sofas were all covered in plastic, and all the windows had curtains. The shoes and coats must have been put away somewhere, because they weren’t anywhere on the floor.
Jonah’s mother called for him and he came downstairs. “You have a guest,” his mother said. “Isn’t that nice?” She squeezed Karin’s shoulder.
Jonah knotted his hands together and looked at his mother.
“Why don’t you go into the living room and pick out a board game to play?”
Jonah’s mother seemed as nervous as if Karin were there to play with her.
She set out the Monopoly board she must have picked up from the classroom after Jonah stopped going to school, and also a game of Sorry! and Risk. Karin opened took out the Monopoly board and sifted through the pieces. The metal horse was gone. She felt a thrill at this, her power in this other house that wasn’t hers.
Jonah spread the board over the floor. His hands were like porcelain doll hands. They could shatter just like that. She didn’t realize she was touching his hand until it was too late, and then she thought there would be no point in pulling away, because it had already happened: She’d touched him. His skin felt just like skin.
She wasn’t supposed to want to touch boys, and, in school, she didn’t want to touch the boys in her class because of how mean they were. But she was glad to have touched this boy, because he wasn’t a real boy.
“Your skin is so much darker,” he said.
“At first I thought you were dead, but I don’t think that anymore,” Karin said.
“Obviously,” she added.
“What do you do in school?” Jonah said. He flinched, as if he thought she would absolutely not answer him, the way an adult might not.
Karin loved him now, because he didn’t know, as a real boy would, that what she would play would not be what he would play; boys and girls couldn’t play together anymore, some invisible boundary had been raised, and the only time they could cross it, ever, would be in the instance when they stood together and said they took each other, and owned each other now. A
fter that, there would be separate bedrooms and dinners no one ate together, one or the other always so tired.
Karin told him about the recess brides, even though she knew this would no longer be true tomorrow in school. Tomorrow there would be a substitute, who wouldn’t understand the game, and then, at night, there would be Ms. Davidson’s wedding, and after that no one would ever be a bride again.
“We could play,” she said. “Or we don’t have to. I don’t care.”
He was staring at his hands, and it seemed like maybe he’d stopped listening to her. But then he looked up, his white, freckled neck thin and straight. “I’d play,” he said. “You can be the bride.”
EXPECTING
Ms. Perry wore platform shoes with open toes and the very sheerest of required pantyhose. Sometimes she’d even paint her toenails something crazy, like blue or orange. And she read the magazines they did—she could name all the different celebrities. Can you believe that wedding, this divorce, weren’t those first five trips to rehab sufficient?
They wished Ms. Perry were their mother!
The students who loved her were a special kind of girl: glossy-haired glasses-wearers. Their cheeks were swabbed with body glitter sparkling of tiny moons and stars and hearts, maybe, but they were serious about taking notes. They had ambitions.
She told them, believe her, they didn’t wish that.
Ms. Perry was so modest!
The bell rang—and they leapt! They flitted! Pleated skirts opened like umbrellas against rain. It was difficult to avoid seeing who still wore sturdy little girl underwear, and who’d graduated, startlingly, to low-rise bikini bottoms. Ms. Perry always saw more than she intended to see.
The highly relevant example: Amelia Miller, vomiting in the girls’ bathroom. Ms. Perry had been in there to vomit herself—not after a night of boozing. After a night, that turned into a very early morning, of getting tipsier than she’d planned, or imagined she was. And on pear martinis, dusted with cinnamon, like pastries. But not, Ms. Perry saw now, exactly like pastries. She’d been on a date that was clearly going to end up nowhere, not even in bed—he’d told her as much, basically—and she’d want to impress him, show him she could just have fun. She was up for just having fun.
She hadn’t at first realized it was Amelia Miller, of course. Ms. Perry, hearing the vomiting, had been caught off-guard. Was that somehow she herself throwing up?
Amelia came out of the bathroom stall, wiping at her cheeks. Her clavicle jutted forward like pleading hands.
Ms. Perry was swallowing and swallowing.
It wasn’t fair to view a student as a nemesis. Ms. Perry knew that. But Amelia Miller was more virus than girl, contaminating the rest of the class, who crowded around her at lunchtime, their bodies humming like cars about to start, decked out in cheap jewelry and colorful hairbands and patterned knee socks, asserting the differences belied by their uniforms. They wanted diet tips. They wanted to know, Were their lunches healthy? And Amelia Miller would look from lunch to lunch. Nope, nope, and…nope. She would then pick up a clammy slice of turkey, roll it into a kind of flower, and bite off its head.
Amelia, standing before Ms. Perry, was wearing the jewelry, the hairband, the knee socks. But on her they looked staged, as though her mother had dressed her.
It was a terrible thing, not to have a faculty bathroom.
“Amelia,” said Ms. Perry. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
Ms. Perry reminded herself of her own mother, hands on hips.
“I have the flu,” said Amelia. There were broken veins scattered across her face, gathering especially at the eyes, like premature crow’s feet.
Her face was bloated as a drowned person’s.
Ms. Perry could hold it in no longer. Luckily, there was the sink.
“I have the flu,” said Ms. Perry. She wiped her mouth with a brown paper towel folded neatly in half.
Of all the things she saw—Sophie Bloom idly picking her nose in the hallway; Jane Nelson with a poorly-covered-up hickey on her neck, which she admitted was the result of a bicycle pump taken to her face in an ill-fated experiment; Lisa Carter with blood at the seat of her skirt, and many, many midriffs, proudly announcing themselves when ooh-oohing hands shot up in the air—this was the only she’d been obligated to report. But the trouble was the trouble it would take. She’d have to go to the principal, whose fear of computers complicated her life ridiculously. Among other absurdities, he still mandated handwritten report cards. She couldn’t figure it out. Was it maybe supposed to be charming? A bold expression of OCD? She didn’t know where he even got his carbon paper.
She’d have to go to the guidance counselor, who kept boxes of Special K in her office and a Weight Watchers point system pinned to her cork bulletin board. The guidance counselor was forever wanting to share with Ms. Perry what she’d eaten so far that day and how many Weight Watcher points she had left and how good she was being. The guidance counselor was fat in a doughy way, with an undifferentiated shelf of breast that made her seem pushy and obnoxious even when she was just sitting in her desk, quietly munching from a carefully measured-out baggie of Special K. Those were breasts that would charge at you in a crowded store or parking lot: Out of my way!
The guidance counselor would probably just be jealous. Bulimia, she would say. I used to have bulimia. Or anorexia, or a binge-eating disorder. The guidance counselor could get competitive when it came to conversations.
So Ms. Perry had made a deal with Amelia: Don’t come down with the flu again, and no one will have to know.
It hadn’t occurred to Ms. Perry—what was the matter with her?—that Amelia might tell on her for suspicious during-the-day vomiting.
The principal had called her into his office and shut the door. He was concerned, he told her. But the corners of his eyes were pinched tight, and really he was saying, I’m going to fire you. Ms. Perry found herself entirely out of options. Now, if she were to buck up and report Amelia, it would look petty, an unimaginative tit for Amelia’s tat.
Ms. Perry began to speak too quickly, her words tumbling over each other like kindergarteners on their way to recess. She would have told him sooner, she explained—much too quickly! Why couldn’t she slow down?—but she was waiting until the end of the first trimester. Better safe.
It occurred to her only later that the flu really was the best lie, and the most obviously there for the taking. There was something wrong with her, Ms. Perry knew. Her own teachers had accused her imagination of over-activity, and here it was: fidgeting, on the move, racing too far ahead.
The principal’s blush spread even to his scalp, where stray wisps were arranged to approximate hair. He asked her if she needed to lie down. For a moment Ms. Perry panicked. Had she somehow said, I have cancer? Had she given the impression she was dying?
“Sometimes women in your”—he stopped to look at the ceiling—“condition find they need to lie down.” He mimed a pregnant belly, his hand beginning at his chest, swooping far into the air, ending dangerously close to his crotch.
“I don’t need to lie down,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
“That’s all right.”
“The first trimester is almost done?” he asked.
She assured him it was.
“We don’t discriminate here.” His eyes darted up to meet hers, and then away, quickly as squirrels. “That’s just something we don’t do here. These are modern times,” he told her, shaking his head as though confused.
But it would have been preferable if Ms. Perry were married. This was something the principal, very unfortunately, couldn’t deny. This was a private, all-girls’ school, it really couldn’t be helped. There were certain expectations. There were certain standards. It was necessary, then, to have a plan of action in place before Ms. Perry publically confronted the rumors that had now spread from girl to girl like lice. A truth might perhaps have to stretch. The principal’s hands, fisted, pulled slowly at the
air.
So: Ta-da! Voila!
Ms. Perry was married now!
Her students—the ones who loved her—had at first been sad to find out they hadn’t been invited to the wedding, or at least alerted to the news. And she was pregnant?
Hel-lo! Had they missed something?
But they were all past this now: They wished she were their mother!
There was still the lingering question of Ms. Perry’s rings, and so she went to a costume jewelry store and pointed through a glass case to a ring with a small cubic zirconia diamond that looked like a snowflake.
“I don’t know if I would,” said the salesgirl. “Those things look like engagement rings.” She made a quick slice at her throat. “Totally tacky.”
“Oh,” said Ms. Perry. “It’s not for me. I mean, yes, it’s for me, but it’s for a costume. I’m going to be in a play.”
The salesgirl was wearing earrings made of beads and trailing feathers that brushed her shoulders when she lifted them in a double shrug.
Ms. Perry began feeling desperate, as though she had to pee, and badly.
“I’m not in a play. I’m illegitimately pregnant and I teach at a backwards all-girls’ school, and my principal wants me to pretend I’m married.”
Ms. Perry found she believed herself. She summoned a single blooming tear.
The salesgirl put her hand to her mouth. Her nails were painted a careful magenta, and they spread across her face like a dried-out novelty starfish. “No way,” she said. “That’s like…”
“I know!” said Ms. Perry.
“You should sue,” the salesgirl said. “That’s what I would do, no question. I’d just sue his ass and live off the settlement.”
“I would,” Ms. Perry said. “But I’ve got to think about the baby.” She gestured vaguely. “These court cases drag on,” she said. “Even when they’re open-shut.”
And now, awfully, she mimed opening and shutting a door.
But the salesgirl seemed not to notice. “It’s hard on single moms,” she said. The beads in her earrings rattled.
Ms. Perry smiled with one side of her face, like a stroke victim.